Posts by ArguablyShrugs

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Given the state of the world, I'd like a big red "STOP THIS CRAZY CAROUSEL" button...

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

They haven't simulated a brain – only the neuron connectome. Where is the rest of its network?

Neuronal connectome is missing a pretty important part of a living brain signalling – the glial cells like astrocytes. Which modern research hints at being quite important in cognition and responding to stimuli.

In humans, a single astrocyte cell can interact with up to 2 million synapses at a time. I am not aware of any full astrocyte connectome of any model animal, though I could be wrong obviously. It just sounds several orders of magnitude harder to map.

I'd say their fruit fly is more of a zombie with half of its brain missing, as of now.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

> And so on until what? Is there a quantum mechanical limit somewhere beyond A42?

According to XKCD, you get a black hole around A190

https://xkcd.com/3033/

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: "No, this is math and engineering and neuroscience"

Possibly even four or five of those, even if only three fields were mentioned. Never underestimate the power of stupidity...

Don't worry, Kent – these kindly big gentlemen in white coats

are only here to take both you and "her" to a nice room where you'll be free to talk to "her" for the rest of your life. Oh, and the missing door knob on the inside? That's just so you won't get distracted by naysayers. And the locked windows? The same thing.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

I'd upvote you...

...but don't want to break the magic count of 42

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Not a prank, more of a PEBKAC pranking themselves, repeatedly

I feel there is PEBKAC and there is old age, especially with the most common operating systems simply fucking up on UX, AKA the Win 11 or Liquid Arse Mac syndrome. Can't really blame the user anymore…

Not a prank, more of a PEBKAC pranking themselves, repeatedly

A neighbour happens to hit the WIN+UP shortcut (or whatever is it for screen rotation) every few months or so, calling me for help.

In their defence, they are over 90 years old and their lovely wife bakes a neat cake, so always happy to help him.

Pat Gelsinger's EUV lithography gig gets $150M wink from Uncle Sam

It's not just ASML's EUV tech...

…the whole tech relies on a closely interconnected supply chain, from Cymer (?) making the plasma light source to Zeiss making the optics. And all these suppliers have their own – closely held – know how, it's not just like ASML telling Zeiss *how* to make the world's flattest mirrors, they just spec'd that it should be that flat.

Good luck replicating all that in today's US, especially with a brand new tech...

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Not quite terminal

Nothing like that much power, but could have made a nasty fire nevertheless – I'd been just clacking on the keyboard when my whole apartment's lights went out, along with the UPS chiming in.

In the building, all the master switches are in a "locked" (square key) box outside in the hallway. Out I come raging with fury, and indeed, there is a sparky meddling with the box.

"Did you just turn my whole apartment off without any warning?!?"

"No, I am just installing a new meter for your neighbours, never even touched your switch"

Turns out some previous sparky from a different provider forgot to properly tighten the 400/230V three‑phase wires at my meter. Just loose enough that they sparkled when he bumped the box installing the other meter. Probably a good thing, as it could have been quite a ticking fire bomb otherwise, as it must have been loose for years.

Needless to say, the good sparky tightened the mess left by the bad sparky properly and I gave him a beer.

Re: Things that didn't happen

Staplerfahrer Klaus wholeheadedly (?) agrees

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

BOFH feeling festive before Christmas or what?

Since Darryl got off it quite lightly – just a bit of CO2 suffocation and a ruined cheap suit – I'd have expected *both* a lynching *and* an impression in the pavement.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: material and cold

It might be often very cold (in some places), but it's also covered in up to 15 metres of loose, unconsolidated, somewhat thermally insulating lunar regolith. Good luck using that for dumping your excess heat. You'd still need the exact same radiators as in space.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

No worries...

…just disband the NTSB, FAA and all incident reporting and suddenly, there will be zero accidents hence on!

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: They forgot to add the right fungi

A friend's dad was making Calvados at home in the kitchen. Somebody apparently screwed on the cap on the PET bottle full of cider and the happily growing and CO2 producing yeast too tightly, and one evening at their place it blew up in my friend's face without any warning. I was facing the other way, thankfully. The whole kitchen got remodelled afterwards…

A full watercooler bottle going off would be… interesting. Probably enough of the sticky sugary stuff to kill all the devices in all the cubicles.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

All that's left is breeding the spherical cows...

…for the milk

Cyberattack on Dutch prosecution service is keeping speed cameras offline

> You have to admire the US Marines.

You shouldn't eat crayons so much, the artificial colourings aren't really good for your brain

Re: A ... roads dedicated to high-volume, high-speed traffic

The Autobahn itself is often limited to 100 km/h in some stretches, either for maintenance or near to the cities. Which is all well.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

> Questions/Answers? Just run your fingers randomly across the keyboard. Simples!

Nice reminder to include several variations of sadfdsfsdfadsfadsfsfrafsd in one's attacks ;-)

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: HDD spindle bearings

I remember buing some ruggedised 2.5" 80GB drives from Toshiba around two decades ago. Not only had they increased operating altitude limit up to 5 km (it's no fun if your drive crashes when you need to work at an observatory or such), but also an operating temperature from -30 to 80℃ or so.

The spec that stroke me as quite funny was the non‑operating altitude of 12 km – that's well over the *user's* operating altitude...

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Sam's name got deleted from the database halfway through the article, I guess

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Never drawn a gun

Some of them might eat the crayons first.

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: The DNA message

Even more likely:

"CONGRATULATIOS, you have WON the mian prize in Universal lottrey of 1,000,000,000 Zalombian dollars!!! Send your address and telephone number IMMEDIATELY to claim your…"

"Tentacular erectile dysfunction? Worry no more! Our PATENTED & MEDICALLY PROVEN…"

Even a humble keyboard is now political in Taiwan

Re: Smuggling

Good that the CDC and FDA are fully staffed and funded to oversee the import of bulk pharmaceuticals by compounders, and their safety. Oh, wait...

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Re: Bolt from Heaven

"Damn, I missed again"

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Meanwhile, Ordnance Survey...

…still haven't released their detailed 1:25k maps under any Open Government Data licence, unlike almost all other Continental countries' tax‑funded map agencies (the Swiss being a rather fine example, with all of their gov map products available for free for everyone).

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: As i read the passage

xyzzy

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

These are the words of a would-be neo-feudalist and fascist.

Amen, brother. Couldn't have said it better.

The billionaire feckers basically took '1984' as a guidebook, not a warning...

Re: And there was much rejoicing

> I do feel bad for the habitat he likely destroyed. though

I specifically asked the mountain hut in question, and it said it was really glad it could be of service in killing Nazis.

RIP, you good ole mountain hut. Your deeds and sacrifice will be always remembered! Semper Fi. and all of that...

Probably did nazi the hut, being all knackered up.

But at least we got a cracking good story out of it!

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: What3words?

Four King Maps would be better. Unlike proprietary What3Words, it's FOSS.

And panties.gobshite.muffdiver.buttstain really rolls off the tongue!

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

> I should be able to type out most international characters from letters and symbols I can already find on the keyboard, not have to learn key combinations off-by-heart.

Great. Now please tell me how does that work with several languages as in an international keyboard layout. If compose + o gives you ó, how do you get ö then? I might need both, and quite frequently at that. Or è, é, ę, ě, ñ, ň, ...

SpaceX loses a Falcon 9 booster and scrubs a Starship

No, Egon's not autistic. He's psychopathic. That's a very big difference.

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

I have an easy solution...

…just stop counting the crashes – worked so well the last time with COVID for Trumplethinskin!

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Not computer related NSFS

On a tangent, I wonder if anybody ever filled in W26.2 "Contact with edge of stiff paper" under V00-Y99 "External causes of morbidity", as the W26.2 note back-references...

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: Florida also set to announce its own official state cryptid

Come on, it's clearly an alien mind-control parasite worm! It's even visible in all the photos, orange and wriggling on its host head. Similar specimen has been putatively seen on a certain right‑pondian politician /clown/ as well.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: Conflict of Interest

The obligatory ACOUP as to why Trump is a fascist, not that it bothers his fascist supporters in any way:

https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/

One thing for him, he surely gets the speedrun record of going full fascist – even Hitler himself took a few years!

Re: Trump being honest

HAHAHAHAHA….

Re: How surprising

While in no way any real excuse of the left-pondian electorate being utterly dumb in electing ChiefTwat™ again, they have also been heavily gerrymandered by the Reps in the past decades whenever they held any part of local power. Meaning any US elections simply "democratic" aren't...

Re: Here an idea...

I'd prefer "the paedo guy", but he's been pretty litigious about that. Well, at the very least he did say for everybody to forward any Twitter CSAM images to him, IIRC. For "safekeeping", I guess :D

Re: How surprising

Easily. First having been born into some money (it really helps if your Pa is a diamond mining mogul fascist in South Africa), then by joining the C-suite even if others chuck you out of it for being dumb (as did actually happen with him and PayPal – he got fired). Get enough money, you can do anything, including being an apartheid scum fascist.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

The upside to the story might have been if said broadcaster then got a few talented new hires already well trained on Betamax or whatever it was ;-)

Re: Seen that

Well, the C-suite use company accounts and post room all the time. It's just the difference of scale that makes the difference, I guess. A few missing laptops versus missing a few hundred million quid. The first gets you booted, the second gets you a golden parachute.

Odds of city-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth creep upward

Re: But why?

Its eccentric elliptical orbit takes it out of range of our instruments for the better part of its 4 year orbital period, as it's simply too far away to see most of the time – its aphelion (furthest point in orbit) is over twice the aphelion of Mars, IIRC.

Re: Don't Look Up

I am cheering for Bronterocs then.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Huh? People kept asking those questions EVEN after their last post from Nov 24?!?

It explained it all already…

…and it was a perfectly cromulent explanation.

Including the bits about starting a DOS graphical installer from within win 3.1 if one upgraded in place - even if usually not a good idea with windows way back then, but hey :-)

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

Bread |bred| ('polystyrene' in British English)

New boss for Roscosmos as Yury Borisov binned

I miss Rogo. At least he had some balls!* /s

* famously cut off by some 155mm‑delivered shrapnel at his birthday party in occupied Ukraine.

Slava Ukraini!

Robot dogs learn bomb disposal tricks in trials

Typo - "carbon fire disruptors" aren't.

"The mech mut was also eqipped with carbon fire disruptors."

That's a brand name product from CarbonFire, not a generic, in case anybody wondered what "a fire disruptor made our of carbon" is…

Basically an explosive waterjet cutter which cuts through any fusing mechanism faster than said mechanism can initiate.